I don’t meet his eyes. “Not with me and Laiken.”
“Why?”
I inhale, then exhale, then I do it again. “Because what she gave me should have been enough.”
He presses a knuckle into his eye, and twists it. “You’re gonna have to expand.”
I palm my jaw. “I should have left it at that, to the words she put in my notebook, but I insisted she sing them for me, after she told me she couldn’t.”
He stays quiet, and I feel inclined to add, “You didn’t hear it, man, the way I’d forced her to bleed. It was…brutal.”
A crow squawks in the distance; an ominous call lingering over our tense silence.
I lean forward, then back again, drag my hands through my hair, feeling stringy pieces catch on my beat-up fist.
I see Harlen clock the mess.
“What does the other guy look like?” he asks, assessing the dried blood, the split skin, shifting away from what I’d just shared with him.
I glance over my shoulder, making sure the large glass doors are closed. A lamp is on inside, but there’s no movement. “She asleep?” And when I bring my eyes back, Harlen nods.
So, I tell him, “I went looking for it.”
“For what?” he counters, pinching his brows together with his fingers.
My heart kicks behind my ribs. I chew on my thumbnail, tear it away, spit it aside. “You know what.”
Harlen clicks his tongue behind his teeth, sighs. “You know what this means now…”
I speak over him. “I didn’t do it. I mean, I had it. Fucked Ally just so I could, stared at it for a while, was so close to…but I didn’t.” I turn my neck until I’ve locked eyes with my best friend. “I wanted to, but…”
I shuffle in my seat, swipe a finger beneath my nose. It’s not often I admit defeat. Harlen doesn’t care about that though.
He clears his throat, asks with the squint of an eye, “Why you running, bro?”
His question stops me cold, and a shiver follows at the edge of it.
He doesn’t wait a full beat before he continues, “‘I don’t run from my fucking storm, man.’Isn’t that what you once said?” He watches me, and I watch him. We don’t take our eyes off each other. “So, you wanna tell me why the fuck you are ready to run from hers?”
I lean forward, push the pad of my thumbs beneath my top teeth, feeling the grooves cut against my skin.
Pain so heavy and guilt so vile pierces through my chest. I try moving it with my thumb.
It doesn’t work.
So, I shuffle in my seat, swipe a finger beneath my nose, then I pop a knuckle and crack my neck. I can feel my veins pumping the blood through the back of my killer hands.
I look at my best friend, and when he stares at me, I know he sees what scares me mostand still, he says, “She gave you something today, a piece of her. You can’t make someone do that, you can’t force someone to sing. Those words, that voice, she did that all on her own, because something inside of her wanted you to hear it, to have it.” He leans forward. “To fucking keep it. So, don’t run from it, man. Not again.”
I bow my head and silence closes in, tightens around my spine, my ribs.
And yet, I find a way to tell him, “Harlen, me and her,us, we are a…catastrophe. We aren’t good for each other. Our trauma, it’s too intertwined. Bound to the same storm, we are fucking messy…unpredictable.”
He shrugs, jumps off the railing like none of what I just said matters.
“Yeah, well, anything worth dying for is.”
Sleep had evaded me.
